Thousands of early issues of Charlottesville's Daily Progress are now available online. The University of Virginia Library teamed up with the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library to digitize issues from 1893 to 1923.
The blast from the past includes articles from when the Rotunda burned down in 1895 to the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.
"The idea would be in a second stage to do optical character recognition and that means we would make the text searchable so someone could go to our catalog, type in a name or an event, and they should be presented with the page images of the corresponding pages from the paper," said Bradley Daigle, director of UVA Digital Curation Services.
Because the images were digitized from microfilm, some of them are hard to read. The libraries are relying on the community to help them point out the problem spots, so they can fill in the gaps with the original copies.
Organizers also hope to expand the collection past 1923 if they can work out a copyright agreement with the Daily Progress.
